John Lennox

Life

Lennox was born on November 7, 1943, in Northern Ireland. Sources differ on whether his birthplace was Belfast or Armagh, but they agree that he grew up in Armagh, where his father ran a shop. After completing his schooling at the Royal School Armagh, he studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. While there, in 1962, he reportedly attended the final lecture given by C. S. Lewis, on the poet John Donne. He earned a doctorate in mathematics at Cambridge and later received doctoral degrees from the University of Oxford and Cardiff University as well. He also holds a master's degree from the University of Surrey.

Ministry and Work

His academic specialty is group theory, a branch of algebra. He taught for twenty-nine years at Cardiff (University of Wales), during which time he spent a year each at universities in Würzburg and Freiburg in Germany and in Vienna, Austria. He has published more than seventy mathematical papers, co-authored two volumes in the Oxford Mathematical Monographs series, and worked as a translator of Russian mathematical literature. He subsequently became a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College (a fellow being a full member of a college's academic body); he also serves as pastoral adviser at the college. He has served as president of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics (OCCA).

As a Christian apologist, he chiefly addresses the question of whether science has eliminated belief in God. Apologetics is the work of explaining and defending the rationality of the Christian faith through reasoned argument. He has engaged in public debates with atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. On October 21, 2008, he debated Dawkins again at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the venue of the 1860 debate between Huxley and Wilberforce over the theory of evolution. He has also lectured at the Veritas Forum and spoken on BBC Radio, among other venues. His major works include God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, Can Science Explain Everything?, God and Stephen Hawking, which addresses the claims of Stephen Hawking, and 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity.

Influence on the Korean Church

His principal works have been published in Korean translation under titles such as Those Who Would Kill God (Duranno), Big Bang or Creation? (Freewill), The First Seven Days (Holy Wave Plus), Can Science Explain Everything?, Work and Calling, and Where Is God in a Coronavirus World? (Abba Books). In 2020 the Veritas Forum at Korea University invited him to give an online lecture on the question of where God is in the time of COVID-19. As this illustrates, young adults and Christian intellectuals in the Korean church frequently draw on his writings when addressing questions surrounding COVID-19 and the church and in discussions of creation and evolution.

Assessment

Within evangelical circles he is regarded as a leading lay apologist who has drawn on his background as a scientist to counter atheism. By contrast, scientists on the atheist side, such as the American biologist Jerry Coyne, have criticized his efforts to reconcile science and the Christian faith as unconvincing.